Mastercard Lobbied for Online Gambling

Mastercard and all the other major credit card companies have done their job when the UIGEA was passed and the regulations were put in place to regulate the new law. This doesn’t mean necessarily that this was a popular bill with the credit card companies however.

As a matter of fact both Visa and Mastercard support online gambling. Why wouldn’t they, it would mean millions of dollars in revenue in their pockets. According to the third quarter report from Mastercard, they spent $840,000 in the third quarter to lobby our federal government. That money was spread across several issues including regulation of consumer financial products, interchange fees, online payments and Internet gambling.

How important is online gambling to Mastercard? That is hard to say but the $840,000 was around a 24% increase over third quarter lobbying in 2009. Then again it was a far cry from the $2.33 million it spent on lobbying during the financial overhaul bill debates in Congress.

That money spent obviously had no effect on getting a law changed for the foreseeable future but it did get some important legislators to join the fight for regulating online gambling. This does however pose an interesting dilemma for the current states like California, New Jersey and Florida who are in different stages of looking at online gambling intrastate.

If these bills being considered go through and become law, the federal government would then have to determine if Matercard and the other credit card companies would still be violating the UIGEA within those states. Even though the federal government wouldn’t take action, the states it seems are putting themselves in position to force the issue on online gambling.

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Douglas Rennick, a Canadian man, has pleaded guilty to a count of processing offshore bets of U.S. citizens. Originally Rennick was looking at a charge of conspiracy and bank fraud. He had allegedly laundered $350 million dollars for overseas internet gambling companies.
Rennick was indicted in August and on Tuesday entered a guilty plea to the one charge in New York Federal court. Part of the plea was forfeiting $17.1 million and a possible prison term of 6-12 months.

Today the government of France approved a new online gambling bill. The bill passed the French parliament by a narrow 299-233 vote. The French will grant only 30 licenses to operate online casinos and poker rooms within its borders. Though it is now official and France says that licenses will be granted in time for the 2010 World Cup, not everyone is excited about the French market.

France acknowledged that 11 companies have been granted license and have been registered to conduct online sports and horse race betting as well as online poker within France.
According to Arjel president Jean-Francois Vilotte, the regulator of gaming in France,
“There were 35 requests for licenses and we have retained 17 at this stage. None have been formally rejected.